Owen CareyIn the Artists Rep production of David Mamet's "Race," Todd Van Voris (left) and Jim Iorio play powerful men, each in his own way blinded by racial attitudes.

“It’s a complicated world, full of misunderstanding. That’s why we have lawyers.”

So says one of the lawyers at work in the minefields of a controversial case that frames the plot in “Race,” Pultizer-winning playwright David Mamet’s poke at the exposed nerve of American society. A wealthy white man, accused of raping a black woman, presses a pair of law partners -- one white, one black - to take his case. As it turns out, the complications, whether legal, financial or personal, are the misunderstandings.

Mamet constructs a taut, one-act legal procedural, with questions of innocence and evidence tossed around as deftly the blue rubber ball that the two partners play catch with while brainstorming theories about the case. At the same time, he grafts on a running editorial, advancing a strangely reductive view of identity politics and social relations and a set of fixed notions about how people act accordingly.

As directed by Tamara Fisch for Artists Repertory Theatre, the play has an engaging tick-tock tension from its opening moments, as the two law partners veritably attack their potential client -- not because they’re so eager for his business, but to figure out why he’s come to them with the hot-button case.

Jack, the white lawyer, is the most fully written character, and Artists Rep stalwart Todd Van Voris makes the most of his many dimensions, shifting from superciliousness to boyish charm to volcanic anger. Jack’s the kind of guy who’s usually a step ahead of everyone, so Van Voris is at his best here in a scene in which the tables are turned -- as someone else grills him, you can practically see the flywheel of Jack’s mind pick up speed, when all the actor has added are a few subtle, fidgety gestures.

As his partner Henry, Reginald Andre Jackson at first appears to be almost a caricature of racial antagonism, then reveals that to be merely a secondary role Henry plays as a tactic. Jim Iorio, as the accused, isn’t given a lot to do, but makes us feel an appropriately icky mix of guilt and shame, evasiveness, defensiveness and self-righteousness.

Upsetting the scales (of justice and of sexual equilibrium) is the firm’s new hire, a young, Ivy League-educated lawyer named Susan -- the character that suffers most from Mamet’s cardboard-cutout ideas about identity politics. Ayanna Berkshire struggles valiantly to make her more than a cipher at the start and a brittle schemer at the end, but can’t entirely overcome the ridiculous motivations assigned to the character.

That Mamet gave the play a title as simple -- and in a way, blunt -- as “Race” is indicative: He’s trying to take on the elephant in the room and has the chutzpah to believe the right combination of punches will get him the knockout. But the subject of race in America isn’t just the imposing elephant, it’s also the slippery eel -- as pervasive and complex as Mamet indicates here, but not nearly so fixed, so determinative. For all the verisimilitude and vitality that Fisch and her cast bring to bear, “Race” can feel at times like watching three cardboard cut-outs and one multi-dimensional character who in the end is little more than a stand-in for the collective conflicted feelings of guilty white liberals.

After all, it’s not just a complicated world, it’s a nuanced one. That’s why we have theater.